July 31, 2007

Not long ago, we mentioned that The New Yorker’s trademark cartoons have been animated and can be watched as video podcasts (iTunes - Feed). Then there’s The New Yorker Fiction (iTunes - Feed), another relatively new podcast that features famous fiction writers reading out loud selected short stories from the magazine’s fiction archives. (It’s issued only monthly.) Finally, to round things out, another podcast has recently emerged, and it’s simply called Comment (iTunes - Feed) and that’s because it lets you listen to a weekly reading of the magazine’s “Comment” essay, often written by Hendrik Hertzberg, Nicholas Lemann, or David Remnick himself. For a complete list of New Yorker RSS feeds, click here.

July 24, 2007

As with much of the reform plan, "Lights, Camera, Literacy!" was designed to meet the specific needs of middle-grade students, who like to move around, collaborate and learn in novel ways. It also will be offered at the same five schools during the regular academic year.

The course connects filmmaking and text. It's built around three youth-oriented movies: the drama "Akeelah and the Bee" and the documentary "Spellbound," both about spelling bees, and "Searching for Bobby Fischer," an homage to humanity and chess. Students work from film to script, transferring their skills as film-watchers to the printed page. They also develop their own short movies, studying such concepts as the character arc and the storyboard.

Much of the four-week summer class will be about "ways that we can take visual literacy and translate it into written literacy," said Arla Bowers, an instructional specialist in the Montgomery school system who focuses on communication literacy.

July 22, 2007

The newly proposed “All Children Can Achieve Act” includes evaluating “teacher effectiveness” based on increases in students’ test scores over a four-year period. Here’s a press release from Senator Norm Coleman, R-Minnesota:<http://coleman.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressReleases.Detail&PressRelease_id=1365&Month=7&Year=2007>

Here’s a key statement from this release:“One of the most important factors in school and student achievement is teachers. The quality of teachers should be determined by their effect on students’ learning, not just their qualifications. All students should have effective teachers. Thus, these data systems must link student achievement data to teachers, allowing states to measure teacher effectiveness.”

The bill does allude to increasingly “flexibility” in terms of relying solely on test scores as a measure of student achievement: “States should be held accountable for student achievement. However, students do not progress at the same pace or start in the same place. Thus, states are allowed the flexibility to measure student academic growth, rather than looking at absolute test scores. States are also encouraged to look at merit pay including getting the best teachers to teach in the poorest schools.”

However, the bill also refers to “comprehensive data systems”: “To ensure parents that all students are achieving, states must create comprehensive data systems that track students’ academic progress and other factors that affect their success.” My own reading of this is that existing reading/math test scores will remain as the primary measure of “achievement” and “data systems” in Minnesota, which has, unlike Nebraska and other states, demonstrated little interest in exploring alternative achievement measures for meeting NCLB mandates.

As teachers know, determining if a teacher is “effective” based on test scores ignores all of the other factors that influence those scores. It will also further perpetuate teaching for the test that already is having adverse effects on Minnesota schools.

Given the push for “teacher accountability,” there is a good possibility that NCLB revisions will include this provision, something that the NEA opposes. However, the public often assumes that teacher opposition to such provisions is only a defensive attempt to “protect themselves.”

Dick Allington, University of Tennessee, notes some of the problems with a growth model for determining teacher effectiveness:

1. Who is the teacher? Some RF kids see three different teachers during the school day (and get three different reading lessons from three different reading programs). So will every teacher be credited with proportional responsibility based on proportional minutes of instruction offered? This is only getting worse with the advent of RTI models.

2. What's the test? As Anne and I noted in our Kappan article last year, TN DOE allows the state test to be read aloud to pupils with disabilities This makes the teachers of these children look like miracle workers, at least in the first year. The modified tests are used in calculating state school grades and AYP. KY has a similar policy and probably other states. But FL has revoked the licenses of teachers and principals for doing the same thing. TX allows teachers to read the proper nouns aloud on state tests. So how can you calculate teacher effects if the read aloud to kids accommodation is allowed?

3. What happens when a kid is retained? How is progress going to be calculated? Against grade placement standards or against the grade standards the kid should be in? Remember that by mandating the flunking of some 35,000 kids, FL state and NAEP scores hit all time highs year before last. Now that those flunked kids are back in the 4th grade pool the state scores dropped dramatically.

4. What score will be assigned to a kid on a state test? Here I am thinking about the use of confidence intervals. Some states use straight score attainment, some use 95% confidence interval for determining who passes state test and some use a 99% confidence interval. In either case, using confidence intervals, which I recommend, means kids pass in those states that would fail to meet AYP in states that don't use confidence intervals.

5. Mobility is also a problem. The former accountability director for Philly schools published an analysis of Philly schools showing that some schools had enormous mobility in and out. Do you only count the students enrolled for the full year or any kid there on testing day? Such decisions will make a big difference. If only kids there all year, some teachers will be graded based on 5-6 kids. Maybe only kids from the most stable families. If every kid there on testing day counts then teachers will be graded based on 12-14 kids they only taught for part of the year, perhaps only a few weeks.

And all of this assumes state test are valid and reliable measures of reading development.

6. Most growth models ignore the well established phenomenon of summer reading setback that Anne and I have written fairly extensively about. The setback most often occurs and is largest for children from poor families. Unless the method requires twice yearly testing, fall and spring, the models ignore the fact that poor kids lose 3-4 months reading achievement every summer. Best analyses indicate that about 80% of the rich/poor achievement gap can be assigned to summer setback not to poor teaching. But if use of Fall-Spring tests in required, when teachers produce a year's growth poor kids continue to fall behind because of summer setback. Such a model would produce effective teachers when poor kids were two or more years behind by 5th grade.

July 21, 2007

The new book, The Top Ten Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, edited by J. Peder Zane, includes 125 writers listed of their top ten books and reasons for their selections. These listings were then combined to create summaries of the 544 books.

Arguably the most pressing challenge in education today is the achievement gap, that learning difference between more affluent white students and more disadvantaged black students. Educators and others are working on a range of solutions: more parental involvement, charter schools, more emphasis on math and reading, and culturally competent teaching, to name just a few.

But here's another tool for that toolkit: summertime reading. When parents or other adults make reading fun and set the stage for children to spend some of their summer down time with the written word, the back-to-school payoffs can be huge, education experts say.

Researchers at the Center for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University say all kids are at risk to lose some school-year learning in what's known as the "summer slide." Without reinforcement, proficiency in basic academic skills like reading and math can indeed diminish. And research confirms that the problem is magnified for lower-income students

July 11, 2007

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a series of federal tests administered every few years to a sample of students in grades 4, 8 and 12, the percentage of kids who said they read for fun almost every day dropped from 43 percent in fourth grade to 19 percent in eighth grade in 1998, the year “Sorcerer’s Stone” was published in the United States. In 2005, when “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” the sixth book, was published, the results were identical.

July 10, 2007

To most of the workshop students, life has become totally visual. They are members of not so much the Me Generation as the Eye Generation.

"I really don't like reading a story. I like seeing it," says workshop student Craig Patterson, 17, of Grove City, Ohio. "I almost always prefer the movie version of a book. Movies can capture the beauty of an image more than books can."

Cecile Guillemin, a 17-year-old workshop participant who is in her last year at Lycee Rochambeau, the French International School, says, "I don't have time to read books. I am inspired by books to do movies."

Last Updated: Monday, 9 July 2007, 17:54 GMT 18:54 UK
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'More reading' than in 1970s
bookshop
Books have been flying off the shelves
People in the UK seem to have been reading more over the past quarter of a century, a study suggests.

Contrary to expectations it is books that are more popular, according to a team at the University of Manchester.

They analysed thousands of time-use diaries compiled for official census agencies in five countries in 1975 and again at the turn of the millennium.

One theory is books are ideal to fill gaps in people's schedules - and with busier lives there are more gaps.

Women increasingly are reading more than men. The number of people in the UK reading newspapers and magazines has declined, though those who do read them do so for longer.

Becoming skilled readers, writers, speakers, listeners, and thinkers requires ample opportunity for practice, authentic reasons for communicating, and effective instructional support. To achieve competence in literacy, students must be motivated to engage with literacy tasks and to improve their proficiency as readers and writers. Instruction and practice then provide the coaching and feedback necessary to gain competence. Increased competence inspires continued motivation to engage. This cycle supports improved student achievement. The role of school leaders is to ensure that this cycle of engagement and instruction is provided by all teachers to all students.

July 05, 2007

July 1, 2007—Thanks to an online audio archive developed by professors at the University of Pennsylvania, recordings of Ezra Pound or William Carlos Williams can take their places on students’ iPods alongside tunes from Better than Ezra or Carlos Santana. Recordings of these two poets’ works are now available free of charge through PennSound, which features about 200 writers and more than 10,000 recordings contributed by poets, fans, and scholars worldwide. The two-year-old site recently acquired rare readings by Pound, some previously unknown. Hearing any poet “makes the poems easier to move into, in some cases,” said Tree Swenson, director of the Academy of American Poets in New York. “Our ears are less logical than our eyes, somehow.” Pound in particular, she said, “is a perfect example of a poet whose tone and phrasing is so distinctive.” While many web sites stream poetry readings, they require an active internet connection. With PennSound, files are downloadable in MP3 format and can be played offline and on portable devices such as iPods, said Charles Bernstein, an English professor and the site’s co-director.